Beyond Copilots - How ServiceNow Is Building the AI Enterprise to Power Business Transformation

Yeah, no, thank you for the question and hello everyone. So, see, I have been following ServiceNow for many years. ServiceNow is this company which probably for G2K use, all of G2K, Global 2000 use today, but not too many people understand. But I have seen the power of the platform they've been building, and we saw that in many of the customers when I was at Google Cloud as well as Oracle, using ServiceNow to automate the business and run efficiently and going beyond it to every other department. So when Bill called me, one of the things which was attractive to me was the vision they had to use AI to really solve the next generation problem, especially around agentic, and how we could make sure the platform of ServiceNow gets modernized with a lot of the AI capabilities while we, of course, allow all our customers to adopt it as part of the same platform instead of having to go to something different as well. So it sounded very exciting. I was working on AI at Google Cloud as well, but we were doing it at infrastructure level. Now, more I understood with what the possibilities of large language models out there was that the value would be a lot more at a business process level. You could automate, you can get a lot of value creation, you can get a lot of good outcome for customers, and the monetization for that is much higher than just providing an API to an LLM call. So those things were adding up, and when I spoke to everybody at ServiceNow, the board and others, the ambition, the humility, the hunger was there, and it was really a good fit in terms of where I wanted to be next. And I'm seeing a huge amount of traction with ServiceNow with all the customers, and that path kind of made sense.

Yeah, I think that this idea of what we've been thinking through — I mean, no doubt we were doing a lot of work at workflow, right? The idea of having a business process which cuts across multiple business systems and connects them together east to west in a way as well as north to south, so that you can have a little more abstraction on top of all the various different systems of records as well as different legacy systems or third-party applications, while not having to go and keep on changing them if you want to automate your business on the top. So that made complete sense, that was definitely doing quite well. Now what we're seeing a lot of requirements around is around data integration as well. So the idea that you want to take a lot of the data which is in very disparate data sources, be it in different data warehouses like Snowflake, Databricks, or Redshift, or BigQuery, or even Oracle, and be able to now make sense out of it without having to move it around, right? So the whole idea of doing things with zero-copy architecture and making it easier for customers to get value out of the investment they made in the data, but now be able to do insight to action at a business process level, not at again the data level, so that the efficiency and the improvement gets much higher value than by doing it at an infrastructure and data level. So that's the second part. And then when you think about AI, we've been always at ServiceNow for the last many years. They were the first ones to kind of add AI, especially initially starting with the idea of doing generative AI and summarization, but now with the agentic part of the same platform. So if you combine the power of AI with data and workflow, you can really transform a business end to end. So that's really our thinking. And now we've gone beyond. We of course started at IT transformation. So if you talk to customers, everybody wants to get much more efficient at addressing any kind of requirements customer users have inside the company for IT requests. But if you take the same idea of case management or the idea of solving issues or system of action in a way to all the other departments, right, going away from just IT to security is another one, right, where you're doing incident management, you're doing things around figuring out any kind of triaging of issues you might have run into, applying patches to the right system through IT, but starting from a security perspective, right. Then you go to HR where you have employee kind of requests, employees require help and they don't know whether it's an IT issue or legal issue or HR issue or finance issue. So they want to be able to now get help inside the company, work efficiently through a similar environment as well. So that's how we're extending, going our way of business transformation is going and touching each part of the company, making them all connected. We're doing things around finance, procurement, supply chain, customer service, order management, procurement of course, but from the order management perspective too, all the way to quoting as well as the whole CPQ. So combining all those parts of your business through one platform, that's where the power comes in. So you don't have to go and implement different different pieces everywhere. The same platform scales to those workflows, have the ability to have the same data model, same architecture, same experience end to end. And now for IT departments, it's a boon because they don't have to now go and reimplement all these things everywhere. They get much more efficiency through the same platform and they're able to now deliver a lot more value to all the different business users inside the company as well as to external customers who might need customer service as well. So that's how we're thinking about it, and today our platform is able to kind of deliver that with agentic AI as the core building block.

Oh, for sure. I think that multiple things, right? A good thing about companies like ServiceNow and my previous roles as well, been very customer-centric. So one, we try to make sure our customers are getting value. Any products we sell, how quickly are they going to implement, what value are they creating, are they able to get more efficient or save money, but also grow top line. So we collect that data on a regular basis. We look at the ROI as well as the TCO on that. That's usually the big thing internally inside the company. We of course try to run a lot of these capabilities inside and see are we getting efficiency gains, so the metrics from that perspective as well. But the broader thing for us is that as long as our customer base is growing, our ecosystem — we've been very open-minded in terms of integrating with various third-party systems. So are we able to touch all the various systems inside an enterprise and are we able to run and integrate with them so that customers don't have to completely revamp everything to adopt ServiceNow. So the efficiency around that is very valuable too as well. And the metric beyond that is revenue growth of course and efficiency in our business itself, and how effective have we been to continue delivering outcomes for our customers.

Yeah, I think this is — ServiceNow culturally, as I said, is very customer-centric and the idea of being humble and hungry, right? So we're very ambitious in terms of growing while making sure we do it in the right way. So the company always puts customers first. I have never seen the customer-centricity this well defined inside the company than any other place I have worked with or people I interact with. So it's a good culturally established — Fred Luddy, who was the co-founder, the founder of the company, started this company at 50. There's very few entrepreneurs who start that at that age, and to grow this company over the last 20 years to around 13 billion in revenue, growing at 20%, very profitable as well as growing and expanding in terms of capabilities, has been, I think, based on how Fred thought about this organization. Then we have a very ambitious CEO and very visionary as well with Bill McDermott, who has been really thoughtful about what kind of value we can create for customers, and he talks to customers on a regular basis to ensure that we are thinking of them first and then building a partner ecosystem around it. So culturally it's very thoughtful. We have gone through three CEO transitions and very smoothly as well. So it's very mature in that manner. Now the next phase for us is to grow in terms of scaling mindset, scaling how we deliver things, how we do multiple things. We are doing few products, many products today, we want to double those things as well. So how do we scale, and that's where my experience with what we've done at GCP or Oracle comes into the picture, right? We had 27,000 employees today at ServiceNow. When I left Oracle, we were 140,000. When I joined Oracle, it was probably around 10,000, so we scaled there. Same thing happened at Google when I joined. We were probably around 15,000, by the time I left, 50-ish for Google Cloud. So the idea is to bring that experience and the knowledge of how do you scale in a good manner. How do you make sure the customer outcomes are still delivered, what we promise to customers doesn't fail. But also bringing in the experience, bringing in the processes, bringing the scale so that we do this right. And so that's our goal right now. Now, I mean, we are definitely been sharing what we've been doing on the AI products. For example, we have a product called Now Assist, which is our AI automation, agentic-based capabilities. We have promised Wall Street it'll be a billion dollar next year by itself. This year, it's already — first part of the year when we announced it public was 300 million already, and it's growing at a very high rate. So we're on target of that, and that requires this idea of how do you do customer success? How do you remove barriers between pre-sales, post-sales? How do you make sure engineering is thinking about customer outcomes? How do the product teams think about better experiences from a product user experience perspective? How do you integrate things better? How do you partner better with a lot of different vendors? We're doing some acquisitions as well. Since I've joined, we've done around six acquisitions, three at decent size. And how do you integrate them fast so that the outcome is better, right? So all the things require a continuous evolution, and the scale is what I'm bringing at least from my experience from the other two jobs, as well as the customer-centricity, as well as the humility and hunger at ServiceNow, and this combination can really create magic, I think.

Yeah. No, I think when I joined, there was definitely a lot of things we were trying to replicate what I could get from other third parties, and then we can really make sure we go and focus on the IP ServiceNow has, right? So our IP is again understanding enterprise systems, understanding business processes, integrating different things together and making it more efficient. So we now support multiple large language models, and we let customers choose. Similarly, we integrate with various different data sources using zero-copy connectors and other things like that. We also support multiple hyperscalers. So our product can run anywhere, on-prem as well as all hyperscalers, same codebase. So architecturally the team has done a wonderful job to be able to now support all the different things which are happening in the industry and be able to build around it and make sure the IP shines without being just kind of thinking about it being ChatGPT, right. So we started with GenAI, as I said, the idea of summarization, but more and more our investment is all around agentic workflows. So I'll give you some examples. I mean, a customer like AstraZeneca, large drug manufacturer, they have a problem where it takes them a long time through the process when they get data from a drug trial to productize the outcome. It used to take them a long, long time because the process was cumbersome. A lot of data was missing. Approvals took a lot of time. Nobody knew who needed to do what. So they automated a lot of that stuff with agentic, where they're able to now remove a lot of the barriers, get down to the specifics, the tasks can be automated through AI agents, and wherever human review or approval is required, they can push it out. They have got it down for like some of the core basic business process for documentation and review to less than 30 minutes from like 30 days. And these are things we're seeing like similar — Pure Storage, large technology company, for customer service, right? They've been able to reduce the amount of time it takes to resolve an issue, and it's the case management work we do in the background — who are the people who need to solve the problem, how do we address it, be able to do multilingual, be able to do multimodal, all that stuff on the platform has been very valuable to them as well. So a lot of the things are really how we are bringing AI, but it's not AI for AI's sake. A lot of customers might not even know AI is used underneath, even though we're using a lot of this technology. We're trying to make sure our product shines by itself without worrying about tomorrow we might change some of the technologies underneath the covers and it shouldn't matter to them. Same thing we're doing with enterprise search. The idea of how do you curate the content and how you bring individual things inside people's mind, which is more curated in the business context, to the data they get from the data sources. So how you combine those things as well.